Despite the hopelessly divided nature of the American government, there is one issue that gains immediate bipartisan consensus in the House and Senate, in red states and in blue — China.
Democrats and Republicans in both Houses and even the President are united in taking harsh measures and escalating those measures at will against China, publicly, even as we are in the midst of a proxy fight with Russia over their invasion of the Ukraine. Why?
Even if we possessed the will, we could not “consciously decouple” — at least not immediately. So — why start a second Cold War barely thirty years after the last one over an ill-begotten spy balloon? What, exactly, is to be gained?
Answer: Little. There is little wisdom in the performative shooting down of “space junk,” except for that which we are not seeing in the President’s polls. And what we are not seeing in the President’s private polling is that the majority of Americans are enraged at China’s rise and, conversely, with the growing perception of America’s declining power. This is quite literally the central narrative of Fox News. Also, China is not entirely to blame for this state of affairs, American corporations also have their share of blame. But that gets overlooked.
Quite a bit of the anger over the perception of America’s declining influence, however, is focused on China. The trade deals forged by previous Presidents — largely, but not entirely Democrat — decimated American manufacturing, while strengthening the Chinese economy. "For decades, trade policy was often reduced to a zero-sum game that left many of our workers behind," Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, told USA Today last year. This is the major reason why the Trans Pacific Partnership, whatever its merits and/or faults, never stood a chance. It carried about it the stink of the China-WTO deal; it even had a Clinton as an initial defender. When Trump finally killed it, Biden did not bring it back, for fear of alienating manufacturing laborers in key states, like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin. In an tragic-ironic post note: China has applied to become a member to the successor of the TPP.
The Biden Presidency has sought to bolster the working class and regain the Rust Belt — goals that haven’t been prioritized in quite some time by the Executive Branch. Biden’s candidacy arose out of the COVID pandemic, where blue-collar manual laborers could not continue to draw a salary via a “Zoom call.” Further, though less frequently commented upon in the media, the Biden Presidency contrasted itself against the ivy-educated elites that favored access to Chinese markets over protecting blue collar jobs. It began with Joe from Scranton, the Centrist that could beat Trump, to the born-again blue collar Progressive during the course of three years, from campaign to midterms.
America started bleeding manufacturing jobs, with gusto, under Clinton. Biden — University of Delaware; Syracuse University — seeks to save the Democrat Party from the neoliberalism that would alienate it from the white working class forever. Jeet Heer of The Nation reminds us that Biden is the first Democrat President in 40 years that has not employed Larry Summers of Harvard. It’s about time! Or, as Biden himself said at this year’s State of the Union:
Tonight, I’m also announcing new standards to require all construction materials used in federal infrastructure projects to be made in America.
American-made lumber, glass, drywall, fiber optic cables.
And on my watch, American roads, American bridges, and American highways will be made with American products.
My economic plan is about investing in places and people that have been forgotten. Amid the economic upheaval of the past four decades, too many people have been left behind or treated like they’re invisible.
Maybe that’s you, watching at home.
You remember the jobs that went away. And you wonder whether a path even exists anymore for you and your children to get ahead without moving away.
I get it.
That’s why we’re building an economy where no one is left behind.
All admirable goals, to be sure. But what is the wisdom of now courting a second Cold War, this time with China, a country in which our economy is so thoroughly enmeshed? And, we cannot fail to note, that despite the fact that Beijing played Clinton, and, for that matter, Obama, like Stradavarii, they came through for us — and the world economy — during the economic crisis of 2008. That crisis, of course, also precipitated China’s rise. Obama famously said when asked that he could not have started a trade war with China during his Presidency because the global economy was still too fragile from the global financial crisis of 2008-9. Perhaps Biden should look towards the fragility of the global economy right now.
The saber-rattling is growing more intense. Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced that it was expanding the American military presence in the Philippines, in addition to its already threatening militant stance on Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province. Would we actually go to war to protect Taiwan? And what happened to the doves? “In Washington, the so-called doves who long championed engagement with China have been completely sidelined,” writes Robbie Gramer and Christian Lu in Foreign Policy. “Policymakers and lawmakers across the increasingly wide political spectrum have coalesced into a consensus: It’s time to get tough on China—whatever that means in practice.” This is what it sounds like, when doves cry?
So — Are we actually in another Cold War? Benjamin Hart of The Intelligencer asked Robert Daly, the Director of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China, about the application of the Cold War framework for this situation. He responded:
It is a Cold War, but it’s not the Cold War. There are a number of major differences. A lot of Americans reject the Cold War analogy, for, I think, three reasons. One is that during the first Cold War, the Soviet Union was not a comprehensive power, not a pure competitor of the United States. It was just a military power. China is a pure competitor. So calling this a Cold War triggers the old Cold War responses in Washington, which are not going to be adequate to the China challenge. That’s a legitimate critique. Another is that we weren’t economically integrated with the Soviet Union, but we’re deeply economically integrated with China. Trump’s trade war failed, and our imports and exports continue to go up. How do we have a trade war with a country we’re so integrated with? Again, a fair question. The third reason no one wants to call this a Cold War is that it’s depressing as hell. We thought we were better than this, we thought we’d moved past it. We think declaring a Cold War is retrograde, that it casts us as the bad guy. So we’re hesitant to use that kind of language.
Senators received two intelligence briefings this week about the growing threat of China. Any “Cold War” with China, a pure competitor, which is already the top trading partner to 120 countries, will involve a mix of smart trade policy and technological competition at the highest level. “Some lawmaker and experts see escalating tensions with China as the dawn of a new Cold War that will require a major ramp up military- and technology-related spending on stealth bombers, semiconductors, artificial intelligence and communications technology,” noted Alexander Bolton in The Hill.
A thought experiment: What if Biden’s continued provocations push China into a very dark place, like the place where Putin dwells now. The “Non Aligned” bloc during the Cold War has already emerged, 2.0. What is they side with China over America? What if Xi, reeling from a series of very poor decisions, worried about his hold on the country after the failure to vaccinate the elderly, decides to side openly with Russia in the Ukraine invasion?
Then, what? What if President Xi went so far as to offer military and technological aid to Russia in the next year, as the Ukraine War reaches a fever pitch? Then, what? Do we escalate more, perhaps, and bring the world closer to another World War, hot, not just Cold?
We had better be prepared to answer these questions, because the escalation continues and we know not the breaking point. Further, that escalation on the American side is bipartisan, meaning, there are no checks against overreach. There are no checks against overreach, that is, until, China decides it has had enough.
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